Occultism and Mushrooms

Not necessarily psychotropic mushrooms. To learn more about them, read Andy Letcher’s Shroom or the works of Paul Stamets, Dale Pendell, etc.

These are metaphorical mushrooms—or mushrooms as metaphor—from an article by Wouter Hanegraaff on the German scholar of esotericism Will-Erich Peuckert (1895-1969):

To me, [Peuckert’s] book [Pansophie] breathed  an unmistakable mycological atmosphere: the mushrooms I used to collect during my trips through the forest, and the strange ideas and personalities that Peuckert had collected during his forays through the tangled woods of early modern history, simply “smelled” the same. The effect of the book had a lot to do with Peuckert’s inimitable prose … by which he introduced his readers to a forgotten world that seemed to be suffused with the same mysterious atmosphere of magic and fairy tales which, to me, had always given mushrooms their special attraction. Whereas green plants, trees and flowers flourish in broad daylight for all to see, mushrooms were half-hidden creatures of twilight, ambiguous and potentially poisonous plants-that-are-not-really-plants (what were they, really?) associated by popular tradition with the forbidden domains of magic and witchcraft. In short, mushrooms might be defined metaphorically as the occult in biology—and conversely, one could say that Peuckert now introduced me to what seemed like the mushrooms of history. Just as mushrooms grow in the autumn and are thus associated with decay and the decline of the life cycle, Peuckert described the magic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the final flowering of a grand worlview in decline, inevitably doomed to be dissolved by the rise of bourgeois culture.

Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Will-Erich Peukert and the Light of Nature,” in Esotericism, Religion, and Nature, ed. Arthur Versluis, et al. (Minneapolis: Association for the Study of Esotericism, 2010), 282-83.

Life as an Adjunct Professor

Yet another article on the turn toward academic part-timers. My wife spent twenty years as an adjunct, which on one level was OK with her, because the community college at which she mostly taught dumped hellish loads on their full-time instructors.

On the other hand, the pay was minimal: $600-900 per course. (Welcome to Colorado, where a view of the mountains is considered to be the equivalent of multiplying your wages by two.)

But it is not just the community colleges that rely on part-time faculty:

Even prestigious schools rely heavily on adjuncts, especially for teaching classes of freshmen and sophomores. At Harvard, adjuncts accounted for 57 percent of the faculty in 2005; at Boston University that year, they made up 70 percent. And over the last three decades, the number of adjuncts employed across the country skyrocketed by 210 percent while tenure-track faculty hirings rose merely 7 percent.

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“Unearthing Matriarchy”

The Innovations group blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education has a post titled “Unearthing Matriarchy,” about how the myth of peaceful ancient matriarchies became firmly entrenched (for a time) in Academia, in a way that biblical literalism never could—outside of a denominational college.

Writer Peter Wood points out that while someone who believed openly in literal seven-day creation of the Earth would have a hard time getting hired as a biology professor—and rightly so, in his opinion—a literal believer in the theories of Marija Gimbutas would have no such problem getting a job in a women’s studies department.

I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, but it is a useful thought experiment. Why won’t higher education hold women’s studies to ordinary standards of historical accuracy? Because contemporary American higher education cares far more about protecting its favored group of political ideologies than it does its standards of rational inquiry and scrupulous use of evidence. The standards are cited most conspicuously when they lend themselves to fencing off members of disfavored groups. Why is higher education having such a hard time these days attracting public support? A good part of the reason is that it is so self-indulgent.

Maybe so.  Also, serious peaceful ancient matriarch-ists are tiny in numbers compared to biblical creationists. They do not turn up in state legislatures trying to thwart the teaching of evolution and the choice of school textbooks. They are invisible to the news media.  Having little political power outside Academia and para-Academia, they are treated more gently within its walls.

(Via Prof. Reynolds)

It Sounds All Wrong When You Guys Say It

Best comment on this video: “I think that they’re trying to trick earth women into returning to their planet with them.”

I’m all for “worshiping the divinity expressed in feminine energies,” but why does this video creep so many viewers out?

It reminds me of that tribe in Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death—the Donahues (a joke whose shelf life is long expired).

Blogging: Why Build Somone Else’s Brand?

There is some political name-calling in his post, but Stacy McCain does make one valid point about blogging.

If you are going to work for free, why build someone else’s reputation rather than your own?

I know two people who were writing for The Huffington Post—the site that owner Arianna Huffington has now sold for millions of dollars. As the man said, they got played, she got paid.

Now some of them are suing. But as they have no contracts promising payment, what are their chances?

Another colleague at the university started blogging at Daily Kos. So big deal, you have a “diary” buried deep in the site. You are building Markos Moulitsas’ reputation, not your own. Your “diary” exists only at his whim—regardless of what the site says about “community.”

Yes, I did have a blog at BeliefNet at one time—it was the feed from this one—but they purged it for, apparently, religious incorrectness. I would not go back, nor to the rival religion portal, Patheos.

If you are a blogger—in love with the sound of your own typing—independence is the main fringe benefit.

UPDATE: Law-blogger Eugene Volokh says (tongue in cheek) that we are all exploiting commenters.

UPDATE 2: Is the Huffington business model really piracy?

How Would the World Have Ended?

Count on a librarian to find fascinating stuff on the Web—a list of predictions on how the world was going to end, going back to 4490 BCE.

(TEOTWAWKI: The end of the world as we know it.)

I still have a sentimental fondness for 1973 and Comet Kohoutek.

Y’ Think?

Former American president (1977-1981) Jimmy Carter, international ambassador of helpfulness, notices that many world religions contribute to the oppression of women.

 

What Indo-Europeans Eat

While eating breakfast, I saw a newspaper ad for Indo-European Sunflower Oil.

All I could think was, shouldn’t that be Sindhuh-Europe Sawel-bhel Elaia?

I think I was warped by playing the mad professor in Ionesco’s The Lesson in high school, with his rants on philology.

Aphrodite Smiles

Back when this blog was young, I wrote a post called “Aphrodite will not be Denied”  about the botheration caused to some Muslim clerics by the sultry Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe.

If there is anything that drives the mullahs and imams mad, it is female sexuality.

The bloom is off the rose of the recent Egyptian revolution, you may be sure, for now the Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organized political grouping, wants to establish Saudi-style morality police.

Veena Malik

In a video at this link, the Pakistani actress Veena Malik rips into a grim-faced mullah who claims that she has “filled his heart with sadness.”

“No one in Pakistan can look at her pictures in the presence of their daughters,” he rants. (These mullahs can accelerate from reasonable to rant in 2.4 seconds.)

“I don’t think that her [hypothetical?] son will like to look at his mother’s pictures in the future.” (It’s always all about the boys.)

Whereupon she rips him a new one, suggesting, for example, that he concern himself with Islamic clergy who rape the little boys that they are supposed to be teaching. (Sound familiar?)

In American political discourse, however, feminist values too lead to some odd turnings when they conflict with the mainstream media narrative about “the religion of peace.”

For example, when Time magazine ran a picture of  a young Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban for an alleged sexual offense, the New York Times dismissed the photo as “war porn.”

And although Veena Malik might be shocked to hear it, I see the power of Aphrodite in her “smackdown” of the ranting mullah.  As as goddess, she can manifest how and when she pleases.

Spamming and Swindling with E-Books

Spammers and plagiarists target e-books (Kindle, etc.)

Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Impact Media, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote about his discovery on the Impact Media blog.

Amazon does not care.

Many ebook vendors don’t check copyright on works that are submitted, and Essex noticed that people are stealing content from the web, quickly creating ebooks about the same topics from multiple angles in order to target different keyword variants, and publishing them—some Kindle authors have “written” thousands of books in a single year. The Amazon.com domain name gives these books an added boost in search results; royalty payouts are high even when a book is priced at $0.99, and reviews aren’t a surefire solution to combating the problem.

More information at Making Light.

Bad writers, yes. One man’s trash is another man’s pit of voles. But one of the advantages of e-book/Kindle store/et al that we keep hearing from the e-book enthusiasts is that it bypasses the gatekeepers.

“Stolen content and scammers” is another area, and there isn’t any pressure on Amazon to stop ‘em, since they get their cut regardless. Adding acquiring editors would add time and expense, and keep the struggling geniuses whose works no one understand from ever getting published at all.

Ain’t it wonderful? This is what happens when you “bypass the gatekeepers” (all those grumpy editors).